Mahfuz talks to former Team Canada decathlete Mike Nolan, who’s now co-founder and COO of premium fitness club Altea Active, about identifying market opportunities in a crowded field and building the right team.
Key Takeaways:
[00:07:35] Know your target demographic in detail. Altea Active specifically targets university-educated customers, who are statistically more likely to prioritize health and consider fitness “an unconditional spend,” Nolan says.
[00:18:03] Building a team is serious business. Altea Active’s hiring process is rigorous—sometimes involving as many as four interviews, depending on the position—and so is onboarding.
[00:20:52] As the company grows, be open to adapting your service offerings, but don’t give up your core values. Altea Active customizes its services and facilities to local customer preferences, but its core offering remains the same: “the service and execution of a premium fitness product.”
[00:29:30] Look after yourself. Nolan emphasizes that you can’t build a team of high performers if you’re a physical and emotional wreck. Take time to stay in shape, enjoy life and give your employees a model upon which to base their own journeys.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Welcome to Growth Decoder, a podcast that digs into those pivotal moments that real entrepreneurs face every day to find out how they rose to those challenges. I'm your host, Mahfuz Chowdhury.
Mike Nolan: Protecting culture and getting the good numbers and performance. It needs to come from the top down. You need great leaders to create great leaders.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Today on episode eight, we are looking at the most important aspect of your business, people. I'm talking about your employees and your customers. You have a vision for your business, but you can't do it all yourself. The team you build is the foundation of your success. So how do you attract the right talent?
And how do you attract the right clientele? Your ability to know your customer and anticipate their needs is a crucial part of any successful business.
Someone who has given a lot of thought to the importance of people strategy is Mike Nolan, co-founder and chief operating officer of Altea Active, a premium fitness club with locations across Canada. Mike is a former Team Canada decathlete, who took decades of elite training for a variety of sports and turned it into a company that creates a plethora of opportunities and value for his team and customers.
I can't wait for you to hear all about how Mike translated his athlete's mindset to the business world. Here's my conversation with Mike Nolan.
Welcome to Growth Decoder. It’s an absolute pleasure having you here.
Mike Nolan: Thank you so much.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: I have to get this out of the way. A lot of people will be wondering right off the bat. What on earth is a decathlete? Uh, can you explain what that looks like?
And what it takes to participate in a decathlon?
Mike Nolan: Decathlon is a 10 event discipline. You're dealing with 2 days, 5 events each day. 100 metre, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 metre. Day 2, you're coming back tired, sore, weary, hungry. And you're doing 110 hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, and then a 1,500 metre run.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: I imagine it takes a lot of characteristics, skills and a lot of practice that maybe people don't talk about enough. When you think about this incredible business that you started and all the transferable skills and lessons you took away from your practice back in the days, what are some things you can credit that carried over into the entrepreneurship side of your world?
Mike Nolan: It starts with knowing what you're great at. It starts with identifying what you should and shouldn't listen to, because I guess, ten different disciplines, I'm always in front of multiple different coaches, and these are coaches who have, you know, multiple athletes at the elite level, world stage, in their specialty disciplines.
So I'm working with like Andy McGinnis, who's a sprint specialist, and he's, he's dealing with you know, someone like Bruny Surin, and some of the most, uh, the highest level sprinters in that day, and I'm you know, getting exposure to that person, I have to take what he's telling me in the elite levels and start to realize or dumb it down for myself.
I got to focus on this, this and this because, you know, crawl, walk, run.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And there's a lot of athletes that perform at a world class level that never become entrepreneurs and some that have tried haven't succeeded. What was a moment along your journey that you realized maybe I got the it thing. Maybe I have the thing that will allow me to also take on a successful entrepreneur journey that, um, that gives you the confidence behind being able to execute it properly.
Mike Nolan: I think if there was a moment, it was realizing that passion I had for helping people. So, doing something, I guess, in athletics, it was a full-time job.
It was morning, afternoon, night. You're always counting what you're eating, you're curious about your sleep, your recovery, your clinical therapies. All of these things just tie in, so you have very little time. And that means a job. Hmm. Yeah, you're in university. You're a high performance international athlete and you still have to make money. So, I mean there were sponsors there was things coming in but as a personal trainer you get to really pick and choose your hours and having to find that right little area of where and who to do that with required a right training venue so I could replicate and take what I knew and download out what were the training systems that I wanted to deploy for people who basically were asking for transformation.
So I think that started just the relationship and the connection to a lot of the, you know, the starting points of my journey to, into the, uh, my current, my previous brand with, which was with Movadi and my now existing brand, which were, and I say my, the team that we used to build our existing brand as Altea.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Altea has, uh, such a beautiful origin story, and, uh, you and I were briefly chatting before we started this conversation today, and you, you had me sitting here and Googling, taking a look at the, the true meaning and origin story behind it, and it, uh, it means to be a healer or healing as an activity, which I thought to be really fascinating.
Um, tell me a little bit about what that means to you. You know, it's clearly a very personal name, and you've done a lot of digging to get there. What is your connection with the characteristic of being a healer.
Mike Nolan: I think it comes back to realizing just what I learned as a personal trainer.
Yeah. And that is the effect of high intensity interval training and resetting someone's metabolism. And the effect that that had on their life, their greater life. It obviously transformed their bodies. They became leaner. Some of them, most of them didn't lose weight, but I had to teach them that's not the goal.
The goal is transformation. And when you walk out of a session and you're feeling incredible, you're on cloud nine, you start to see the other elements of your life fall into place. The relationships with your family and friends, the things you're dealing with at work seem a lot easier. Your food and your sleep habits improve.
Everything was just falling into place and it was like, okay, these people are getting healthier.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah.
Mike Nolan: It's about realizing what it is they're coming to us to see. They want a transformation from something.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Right?
Mike Nolan: And the effect of what we bring, I think it's a well-studied journey now. It wasn't back in the early nineties when I was doing training.
I had the luxury of watching it happen, but now it's like podcasters and YouTubers like the information is, it's a lot of information out there and it's accessible and it's easy to understand, even though they're talking neuroscience and quantum physics and metacognition, like they're cracking it so the general public can consume it and they're they're gobbling it up.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah, what's really interesting is in your journey. You've always been paying attention to what do the people need and in this version, we can call them customers. But you've always been thinking about what does the end person need, whether it was your client, whether it was your community, whether it's your team having an attention to detail, I think is such a great skill set.
Maybe one of your superpowers, if I have to guess. Or the many that you carry. Tell me about the attention to detail piece and how that applies to when you open up your location, making sure that every part of what exists there serves your customers and their needs.
Mike Nolan: Okay, great question. I think there's the elements, the physical elements, any big, any business person knows you're going to have to location.
You have to find the right place. And for us, we study our demographics very carefully. And then, ironically, the best kind of number we look for is not just the density and saturation and, you know, average household income, but we really do dig into the university educated, you know, areas where people have studied and learned.
And there's a correlation between people that have university educations and their understanding of health and the priority and the prioritization of that in their lifestyle. Meaning it's an unconditional spend. It's not something that they have to make a decision on. They just know they need to exercise.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah. Right. Can you talk a little bit about cultures and, and how much, how much more important it is for someone in your scenario to be paying attention to what the customers want, not just in one location, but in every location and region that you're looking into going forward?
Mike Nolan: Yeah, and I think kind of on the coattails of the last question, like what the startup of the business, the first club that we opened was the Winnipeg location, really strange because a lot of people don't realize like, or don't think about Winnipeg as a major city and it may be not it's it's you know eight hundred and some odd thousand. It's approaching nine hundred. It's growing. It has one of the highest immigration growth rates of any city in the country. It's a destination for a lot of new Canadians.
These are things we learned about the city, but what we did find out, because when we left our previous brand, we had non-competes in multiple provinces, we had nothing of the sort for um, for Manitoba. Yeah. And the people there are so gracious. They're great people. And the fitness scene was underserviced.
It was old, it was tired, it was stuck in the mid 80s. We knew that our product, our 2.0 suburban model, it was going to be an absolute home run there. So you want to make your first bet a good one. So this was, this was comfortable. We knew the playbook. We knew what we needed to go in and do, and we executed it on almost with like that attention to detail perfection from the design to the layout, to the numbers of this, that, and everything.
And then we get it open. Um, everything comes to life. It's exactly as we had planned and you know, the right ratios of people, the right ratio. And then we grow and it grows. And you start to see where, all right, it wasn't perfect, this detail, this, so you're evaluating your own mistakes constantly when you're paying attention to detail and you're critically thinking through next steps.
So that brought us to Liberty Village, right on the start of Covid. And having to go through that as, as our second project meant we were moving markets, we're going from secondary suburban areas into a, you know, A markets, downtown Toronto, we're going up, you know, we're not buying for like five acre pieces of land to be able to put a new building right from ground up, we now had to find our way and squeeze into an existing structure.
And we found it. Ninety thousand, 89,000 square feet in a building in Liberty Village. Yeah, that's number two. But again, studying those demographics very carefully so that it was a calculated decision was paramount.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah, that calculated piece is incredibly valuable. And I also like the fact that you put some attention on the fact that there is imperfections as well.
Not everything went as planned. Can you talk a little bit about maybe one or two examples of scenarios where something didn't go the way that you envisioned it. And how did you overcome that? What were some pivot steps that you took in those scenarios?
Mike Nolan: Well, I think as being a startup, we're a good size startup, but we're still a startup.
Like we have three facilities, Vancouver being the third, which is a smaller Liberty Village. And that’s a great club. And if I were to say some of the learnings we took from the mistakes in Liberty Village, we applied to West 6 to make it a new and improved urban concept. I'd say that happened. We shrunk down what was too big and we expanded areas that we needed to grow.
Um, that's the main thing is finding the formula for, uh, how many people you need to have in the business, into the building, to service them right, based on what the services are, and how they need to experience it. And for us that premium fitness and wellness space is about luxury, and luxury people don't want to be cramped in.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah.
Mike Nolan: So we have to find the right balance between space, service, price, and availability. All right. And then the experience and the magic can start happening. So, you know, it's a little different formula in the urban market. And so we took the learnings from Liberty Village to tweak the spaces to better accommodate that demographic and the expected use.
Yeah. And, uh, and applied it to number three.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah, that's awesome. And a big part of the brand in my eyes of the story that I'm hearing is it's really you and your mindset, right? A big part of it. And although the team is a big part of the support, a lot of it comes behind your thesis and your vision of what the fitness and wellness industry is all about.
How difficult does it get to maintain that attention to detail and consistency with locations that you can't visit every day and overlook? How do you keep that part of your brand consistent so that it doesn't lose sight of the things you believe in?
Mike Nolan: Yeah, then let's start by saying the you in this is the leadership team.
Yeah. Because I'm not the guy at Altea, I'm a team collaborator and while that has pros and cons, I think the voice you need to hear from knowing who your brand is, are the people that are on the ground, the people in the upper office, you know, the finance team, you need to get a good set of eyes on every component of some of the biggest decisions that you want to see happen.
Someone has to make a decision for sure, but I think it's always going to be a collaborative direction. Getting a lot of buy in, yeah.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Wanting to give the team some love, let's talk a little bit about the team development, right? So, you know, there's a common proverb that you, uh, you can go faster alone but further together, right?
And it seems to me like the togetherness is what really allowed you to get your business to the level that it is at right now. People talk about fit a lot, maybe in the fitness world even more than anything else. But when you're thinking about cultural fit and building that leadership team and making sure that it has people that does give you the type of buy-in that you can really consider in your decision making process.
Talk to me a little bit about your hiring process and making sure that you're bringing in the right fit and what fit means in your space.
Mike Nolan: Great question, because it's a really dynamic process. Like, we are in the position now in our Ottawa region. We have a 130,000 square foot club being built there.
And this is our, from Movadi days, our hometown. We built five clubs there. We know the demographics. We know the service. Um, and we know the formula, but it's the people that are going to be able to execute on what our brand vision is. And so now that we've created this lifestyle brand piece, like who is Altea?
We're going to be the best in fitness, wellness, and we're going to deliver an experience that's far better than anything you're going to receive in the city. And there's a value proposition attached to that. It's about the multiple different disciplines of studio experience, social experience, fitness that you'll get.
And it'll support your needs. So it's almost like we're reflecting back to the members, our potential clients, with our staff, who they are and what they want to become. And so as we're hiring, if we're hiring front of house team people, they have to be charismatic. They have to be vibrant. They have to be energetic.
They have to be passionate about fitness. And luckily for us, those things are kind of synonymous. You know, fitness people just have great energy. They have great passion and they seem to be a lot of the same of what I was. I loved to help people and that servant's heart to be able to get and, you know, anticipate people's needs before they do, that's the soft part of it, but the management side of it, you obviously need skilled, trained leadership, um, and, and building that bench is about finding those complementary strengths and weaknesses when you're assessing, um, each of the roles.
And so your building operations manager is going to have a different required thought process or way of processing problems and issues than your front of house manager, who will be more of a hospitality type personality. Business operations are gonna be more, okay, I understand. I'm curious how things are built.
I know, and I know how to work electrical, plumbing, mechanical, these things.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah.
Mike Nolan: Right. So you're very practical, um, that, that starts it. And then finding not just the traits that the position requires, but then the buy into the, to the brand, the passion, uh, for the fitness element. I think that in all of what we do, there's enough people out there that know and understand that fitness is important, that put that as a decision in their lifestyle that makes it important, and when you bind that to what it is they do for a living, it becomes very powerful.
Sure. To say, yeah, I'm not just a janitor, but I'm a janitor here. Because I love cleaning. Maybe they do love cleaning, but they could be cleaning anywhere. Here, for us, they're cleaning in an environment they love to be in.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Right.
Mike Nolan: And they stay in, and they engage in the product. There's a lot of pride behind the brand.
So I think when it's an expectation I don't love but KPIs I do. Set up a clear set of guidelines that people can execute on, and then, help them, give them the tools to be successful.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Yeah. Yeah. I really love the KPI piece as well.
You know, this is, this gets really into the measurement of success and not just based on gut feeling and instincts. There's some sort of metrics to look back to based on whether or not. The, uh, the relationship and the growth and the process that you have in place is working as well as it has. Um, it sounds to me like a lot of it comes down to customizing your expectations based on the role, right?
Like you're thinking what do I need to fit in and what are the necessary skill sets as someone that is maybe in a in your kind of scenario and they're looking at finding the right fit for their culture. How do you quickly skim and assess those characteristics at the early stages? You know, they're coming in maybe you got a very credible resume in front of you. Did maybe knock that interview out of the park, but how do you get to the roots of those micro nuances that really help with your decision making?
That seems like a really tough thing to do.
Mike Nolan: Well, it's time consuming. Like if we're hiring 232 bodies for the Ottawa location, uh, we need over 3,000 candidates. Like it's, it's a lot. So you have to read and whittle and connect and get to learn who these people are. And it's never just one interview, you're hired.
We're going to do three or four rounds on key positions. Two or three on our secondary, like to be able to build the bench in each of the departments. And then the onboarding program is very intensive. Not saying you want to put them through a boot camp that they don't enjoy, but you certainly do want to expose them to not just the sunny days.
You got to give them the storm. You know, you have to push them and make them realize like, this is, this is not all sunshines and rainbows. Like, so, and you pay attention to body language. Like when training is happening, you be attentive to tone of voice, to body language, to the things that are telling you otherwise, this person might not be as passionate as I thought, right?
It's put on a good act. Well, yeah, in interviews, like, I heard someone say, it's like a meeting between two liars. I don't like that statement, but you kind of get it. You show up at your best. You show up at your best and you give someone, like, no one knows exactly everything about everyone. But we have to get to know them quickly.
And then we have to make really quick decisions on, okay, is this, this candidate has got the stuff or not? Yeah, and save them the hassle of going through it, you know and struggling with being a part of that premium fitness journey that we're trying to deliver. I think I think it's two ways.
I don't want to put people in positions that they're not suited to be in.
No one wants that for either side. So let's avoid that.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: It seems like the best case scenario that yeah, you're you're even as a business you're as transparent as possible about what your culture is what your expectations are. It does seems like a big disservice either way if there's any misleading information in the relationship, right?
And then as we were going through an expansion phase in the coming months to the following year. It's very clear you're passionate about the brand you built and that seems like something that you're protective of and you never want to stray away from the big vision. How do yo continue to maintain that as your team starts getting bigger locations start expanding and and uh having to reiterate? What the brand stands for and bringing in the right people. What processes do you have in place to make sure that those parts of your brand continue to stay intact?
Mike Nolan: I think change is good. Like you think about anything that grows like there's change in growth. You have to adapt and I'm not saying what we started up in Winnipeg is we're stamping it out. We changed it for Liberty Village. We changed it again, but there's a core root of what it is we're doing.
And that's the service and execution of a premium fitness product. And if that's our true north, as it is, then the rest of the elements are more about who and where, and what is it we're providing to them, because there's a little bit of a different expectation in each of the unique demographics that we service.
And so the people luckily that we have as employees delivering that fitness experience in those respected demographics, they're just like that. They're just like the people they're servicing. So we have to embrace those small micro differences. And I say micro because it's, it's not a change of brand.
We're still premium and we're still going to be cleaner than everyone. And we're going to have the best instructors. Um, that has to happen. And that's just the business side of checking the boxes, but it's the delivery of the experience, which is the artistry of business. That's what, as we're growing, we're going to have to continue to evolve.
We're embracing change now. We brought on a new CFO, which is an exciting, you know, addition to our team. There's a lot of bench strength there to say, okay, we are revving up our growth engine to be able to, to hit the gas. And this means we're going to be, um, changing some more. And there's, you know, obviously people that enjoy change, some that don't.
I have a very good appetite for change because I'm a very optimistic person. I see things like, so far ahead, almost like my clients back in the early 90s. You want to be this person? I can get you there. Well, as you're growing a business, you want to, you see the big business in the end. Like, it's going to be a, it's going to be a rough journey.
Like, tell me a startup that hasn't had stories about grinding and digging through and change and adaptation. This is what we're, this is what we're going through.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: You know, it's fascinating. And I want to press on this a bit more because I think people have different views on what change means to them.
You know, for some people, uh, you used a very interesting phrase earlier where you said calculated risks. And I think that's important, right? It's how far does a change go before you're risking, you're betting the farm and you're risking it all? And, uh, a lot of people talk about the, uh, pivoting over and over again and evolving their business every step of the way.
Where do you kind of fall in that, in the extremities of change frequently change often versus what does calculated risk mean to you so that you're not at a point where the change is so big that you can't get back to the roots of your business?
Mike Nolan: I think the calculated elements aren't just about your own business, it's about what's happening out in the demographics you're wanting to service.
Like, we seek those highly educated markets because they are keeping at the forefront of what it is we're developing in the physical structure of the building. And what is, what are these rooms going to deliver? What is going to be a mind body experience at Altea? Like, is it going to be the same yoga studio we designed back in you know, 2018?
No. Like, it's gotta have a, like, sensory and immersive component to it. People understand the power of colors, of lights, they understand the power of sound therapies and healings, they understand, um, you know, the impact of meditation on feeling better and on healing, like there's, and there's scientific proofs that you'd ask me about some of those people that I do follow and, you know, whether it's a tear sheet, but these people are going to help to, to unlock what people want to know about it.
And when we plant clubs there, we better deliver on it. So wellness and longevity, those are two main elements that are underserviced and in our fitness world and so being a forerunner in that and starting to look at ways we can offer more of that for a very hungry demographic that's studied, well researched and yea that's our calculated risk.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: I like it.
Mike Nolan: It's keeping the core fitness component, doing it better every time by learning from our mistakes and starting to really bolt on the ancillary. So the lifestyle brand evolves and continues to get better and better and better and more relevant.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Right. Right. It sounds to me very much like the why and the purpose pieces are still very much consistent and firing on all cylinders, but maybe the how and how you get them there evolves with the, with whatever makes the most sense at that time. And to think what made sense 20, 30 years ago versus now, it's almost ludicrous to think it's the exact same practice when you have a lot more resources and tools available.
Mike Nolan: Yeah. There's times I have to go back to the days of just to root yourself, like in some of the basic components of business and brand and operations and just what we are delivering, like the cleanliness never goes out of style. Like, that's always at the forefront. And being super nice to people, and hospitable, and you know, tell me a business that's not talking about service excellence, but what are you truly doing to be unique?
How are you getting above the crowd and standing out and otherwise, you know, I think the space is huge. Yeah. There's a ton of players out in the market and from small boutiques, which are, I think there's 43 different boutique operators in Liberty Village within like, like a kilometer radius.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: I had no idea.
Mike Nolan: Yeah I mean, and there's bigger operators. It's a lot of things happening in a very tight space, but, you know, getting and differentiating is constant. It's an evolution. It's accepting change. It's all of those things.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Mike, as I wrap up, I think about a lot of our audience members and our, the nice thing about our audience members is it's a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners, people that are key leaders that are in a whole diverse of industries. And I think what's interesting about your story, as much as it's fitness driven, there's clearly a lot of takeaways that applies to any entrepreneur. You talked a lot about finding the right fit and being adaptable and making a lot of decisions and expansion without losing sight of attention to detail and culture.
If you had to give them a couple of ideas, you know, from those transferable skills for those that are listening, that could apply it to their own business. Maybe they're in a stage of expansion. Maybe they're in a stage of finding more employees for their business and they're a little nervous about the risks they're about to take.
What is some advice you would give to someone maybe that was in your shoes a few years ago before you started taking on this journey?
Mike Nolan: I guess a few things. I think it's okay to take calculated risks, but don't take uncalculated risks. Like don't just swing for the fences. I think it's smart to be aggressive, but cautious when you start a new business.
Like our boldest move was, uh, leaving a company that we built over the course of really almost 20 years and, you know, we knew what we were doing. We knew the team that we needed to replicate it. So there was some assurances there, but it was, it was going to be a bit of a challenge and it was a bit, okay, how are we going to transform this?
How are we going to do it? So there was risk involved. I think there's, I mean, as a second to that, I think the element of hard work, like we're talking like blood, sweat and tears. Your passion is not letting you think and do anything else. Like that's where it was. We were doing that and any great new business has to do that.
And like, that's why you're starting a business anyway. So don't think, and this is where, you know, I think restaurants fail because people love the idea of owning a restaurant, but they don't understand. They liked eating at restaurants, they didn't like running them.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Right, very different game.
Mike Nolan: And I just read Will Guidara’s book, Unreasonable Hospitality. Right. It's fantastic, you get to really feel through that, just what it takes, the blood, sweat, and tears to get a restaurant like Eleven Madison Park. You know, to Michelin star, to four star, to number one restaurant in the world. I have a lot of respect for people that pour hard work into it, because that's me. That's what made me a great decathlete. I worked harder than everyone else. That's what makes me strong in business, because I do work harder than most. I dedicate as much time as I can possibly do with two kids, um, to my work and my family. So, third, and this is coming now off of multiple years at Altea and having now grown and opened three clubs with two more on the way.
Yeah. Was making sure, you know, you wear the mask first. And I'm talking about when the oxygen masks come down, get yours on first. Because making yourself feel like…prioritizing yourself in certain respects, and this is like obviously a fitness related thing too, because you know, having a clear mind and a clear conscience going into work has much better results for the outcome.
Because, you know, protecting culture and getting the good numbers and performance, it needs to come from the top down. You need great leaders to create great leaders. And by looking after yourself first, um, finding out how to turn something that's bugging you off to elevate yourself to be the best every day.
That thing you need to find. And it could be running. It could be meditation. It could be prayer. It could be anything. But it needs to take whatever behaviors that get you into your state of anxiety or stress or dysfunction and competition can do it as well. If you're overly competitive, you're driving a fuel that is from an epigenetic sense causing disharmony and hormones and stress and other type level, you need to get into a right space to be a great operator.
That's number three.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: Mike, your story's absolutely inspiring. And I think I understood it when I say that, I think hearing your journey from doing the thing you love and not losing sight of that and finding a way to mix it with business, I think it's incredibly inspiring for a lot of people that want to think a lot about how do I turn what I love and can't stop thinking about every day into something that's not only something I can monetize but really start building it into something magnificent as you have done with your brand. Um huge congratulations on your success. Wishing you an early congratulations for the upcoming expansions. A lot of great things on the way. I know it's just a pit stop in your journey, and I know we're all excited to keep up with it. So thank you very much for joining us today for this really fun conversation.
Mike Nolan: No, thank you. It's been fun. Absolutely.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: That was a great conversation with Mike Nolan of Altea Active. Our first big takeaway from today's episode is the importance of hiring passionate employees. Hiring a person for their personality, not just what's on their resume, is a subtle distinction that could pay off in a big way.
Put time and energy into training them well, and then give them the space to make the job their own. The second takeaway is to sweat the details. The little things are often what sets your company apart, so make sure you're standing out for the right reasons. And finally, do your homework to understand local markets.
Mike and his team dig deep into the demographics of each location they consider you. And analyze the competitive set. Altea tailors each health club to meet the unique needs of the local community. In the next episode, we'll hear from Christine Faulhaber of Faulhaber Agency to learn how she charted a course for the future of the firm without her at the center.
Moving away from the day to day operations. And giving her time to focus on strategy, client relations, and mentorship.
Christine Faulhaber: You're never going to scale or get richer if you're just the only one doing it. And so you really need to be able to set forth expectations. You know, you're not necessarily relinquishing the control completely, but handing out the rope with a framework.
Mahfuz Chowdhury: If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to Growth Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit www.cwbank.com slash podcast for more about Altea Active, as well as the other businesses and topics featured on Growth Decoder. I'm your host, Mahfuz Chowdhury. Thank you for listening.
Growth Decoder is brought to you by Canadian Western Bank with production by SJC.